This algorithm could help predict ISIS' future moves

REUTERS/StringerCould ISIS’s behavior be predicted via an algorithm? A computer scientist has pioneered an artificial intelligence-driven method of modeling the behaviors of militant groups, and the Department of Defense is interested. In a paper titled “Mining for Causal Relationships: A Data-Driven Study of the Islamic State,” presented at the 2015 Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, a team led by Paulo Shakarian of Arizona State University used 2,200 individual data points on ISIS-related incidents from the Institute for the Study of War to build a descriptive model — an algorithm that models ISIS’s behavior. Shakarian, who is a former Army officer, DARPA military fellow, and assistant professor at West Point, applied principals of computer science to turn the raw reports from ISW into a database which he could then analyze. As the paper…